Carlisle: The Children Who Never Came Home

These photos, taken at the cemetery at Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania, are posted for the families of the children who never came home

CARLISLE, Penn. — Most American Indian children in US boarding schools were kidnapped, stolen from their parents. At Carlisle Indian Industrial School, Native American children were part of the US experiment which became the prototype of the boarding schools that followed. Across the US, Indian children were forbidden to speak their language, which carried their songs and ceremonies. Their hair was cut in an attempt to cut the Indian-ness from them.

In boarding schools, children were routinely abused, beaten and sexually abused. Many were tortured and locked in cellars. Some were shot trying to escape. Many died of malnutrition and pneumonia. Others died of tuberculosis and genocide: Children with TB were housed with healthy children, producing the rampant spread of tuberculosis.

The young boys who survived were militarized, made into US soldiers.

At Haskell, the unmarked graves in the marsh tell the rest of the story. Many of the children who died, or were murdered, were buried in unmarked graves without gravestones.

This pattern of genocide was repeated in Australia and Canada. In Canada, at the residential schools operated by churches, there is new evidence that children were raped and murdered.

Irene Favel, survivor of Muscowequan Catholic residential school in Lestock, Saskatchewan, describes seeing a newborn baby thrown alive into a furnace at that school by a priest in 1944. An Indian girl had been raped by a priest and given birth. Watch Favel’s video interview and read more at Hidden from History: http://www.hiddenfromhistory.org/

Carlisle was built on the premise of a prison.

At Carlisle, Richard H. Pratt designed the school, based on his experience at St. Augustine prison in Florida.

“Kill the Indian, and save the man,” Pratt said, stating his theory of education.